FreeBSD 9.0 Press Release and Review

Today, the FreeBSD Foundation announced the recent release of FreeBSD 9.0. FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE raises the bar for open source operating systems in terms of file system reliability, IPv6-readiness, networking capabilities, compiler and toolchain technologies, and security. Many of its new features directly benefit system administrators, application developers, and companies that use or base their products on FreeBSD.

“FreeBSD 9.0 represents the culmination of over two years of ground-breaking work in operating system performance, reliability, and security,”

said Ken Smith, Release Engineer for the FreeBSD Project.

“We are proud to dedicate this release to the memory of Dennis M. Ritchie, one of the founding fathers of the UNIX® operating system, whose vision and work laid the foundations for FreeBSD.”

Filesystem changes in this release provide great benefits to both UFS and ZFS users. When installing with UFS, softupdates journaling (UFS+SUJ) is automatically enabled. UFS+SUJ uses an intent log which safely eliminates the need for a long filesystem check and recovery process, even after an unclean shutdown.

FreeBSD 9.0 also introduces the Highly Available STorage (HAST) framework which provides transparent storage of the same data across several systems connected by a TCP/IP network. In combination with other high availability features of FreeBSD like the CARP fail-over protocol, HAST makes it possible to build a highly available storage cluster that is resistant to hardware failures.

Continuing its heritage of innovating in the area of security research, FreeBSD 9.0 introduces Capsicum. Capsicum is a lightweight framework which extends a POSIX UNIX kernel to support new security capabilities and adds a userland sandbox API. Originally developed as a collaboration between the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Google and sponsored by a grant from Google, FreeBSD was the prototype platform and Chromium was the prototype application. FreeBSD 9.0 provides kernel support as an experimental feature for researchers and early adopters. Application support will follow in a later FreeBSD release and there are plans to provide some initial Capsicum-protected applications in FreeBSD 9.1.

“Google is excited to see the award-winning Capsicum work incorporated in FreeBSD 9.0, bringing native capability security to mainstream UNIX for the first time,”

FreeBSD has been been an early adopter and active participant in the IPv6 community since FreeBSD 4.0 was released in 2000 with the KAME reference implementation of IPv4/IPv6 networking support. In addition, the FreeBSD Project has been serving releases from IPv6-enabled servers for more than 8 years and FreeBSD’s website, mailing lists, and developer infrastructure have been IPv6-enabled since 2007. FreeBSD 9.0 introduces IPv6-only snapshots which completely remove IPv4 from the operating system.

2012 has been called the ‘year of IPv6’ and “the FreeBSD project is well positioned to be one of the leaders in IPv6-Only validation work,” stated Bjoern Zeeb, member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team and recipient of the 2010 Itojun Service Award for his significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6.

“The growing usage of FreeBSD’s IPv6 networking stack by appliance builders, integration of a more flexible interface configuration, and the implementation of new standards such as Secure Neighbor Discovery, DNS Options for Router Advertisements, and CPE Requirements, makes FreeBSD 9.0 the perfect open source operating system to build your IPv6 deployments and products on.”

Other new features include:

userland DTrace has been added to supplement kernel-level DTrace

the FreeBSD world and kernel can now be compiled using the BSD-licensed LLVM toolchain

resource limit actions can be applied to processes, users, login classes, and jails

the addition of a pluggable congestion framework and five new TCP congestion control algorithms

HPN-SSH is enabled by default and increases transfer speeds on long, high bandwidth network links